Except where stated in the post, photos posted on or after January 1st, 2014 are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.Basically, do what you like with those images but always credit Donncha Ó Caoimh as the author and link here. You'll also have to license the photo under the same license.

Cork, Ireland and Elsewhere

Tag: docklands

John Finn’s superb photo of this grain silo that he posted today on Facebook (unfortunately you’ll need to be friends with him to see it) prompted me to dig up this photo of the same building from my output queue.

It was shot in 2014 when we went exploring the docklands one afternoon and I photographed the demolition of the Miag Grain Silo. I love that I caught a flock of birds swooping around the building!

Someone posted a grainy mobile phone picture of demolition work going on in the Docklands, Cork on Facebook a few days ago so I had to go down and record the event for myself.

The building being demolished is the second part of the Miag/Art Deco Silos as seen in this post.

Construction on the earliest elements of the Art Deco silo complex (24), which is located further east along the South Jetties, took place circa 1935-1938. Elements of architectural interest included the staircase and fenestration of the earlier silo and the concrete screen walls to the north and south with glass block vertical glazing of the later building, which was constructed between 1947-1953. The ‘Miag’ silo was damaged by a fire in September 2006 and demolished in summer 2008 following the submission of a report on its structural safety to the City Council. Elements of the structure were salvaged for possible re-use.

I shot photos of the smoke escaping from the burning building in 2006 and Google Plus has made them into an animated GIF I shared here.

There used to be raised corridors leading from the building to the Odlums building next door, and the long raised corridor running parallel with the river but they’ve been removed already. Part of one can be see in the grounds near the building. While I was down there I approached an elderly man sitting in his car watching the activity. He lives close by and told me that as a young lad he had climbed the outside ladder to the top of the building!

There are extensive plans for the docklands and Marina area. Check this PDF for more.

Priestman are, or at least were, a brand of crane and excavator manufactured up until possibly the late 1990s. They have a long history according to this page. I found the logo above on a crane on the docks in Cork Harbour back in 2005. It’s probably still there!

The Priestman story began when William Dent Priestman in 1876, who had founded an engineering firm in Hull six years earlier, was asked to build a winch and grab for work off the west coast of Spain, in an attempt to locate lost gold. Though nothing was ever found, the mechanism that William Dent created was found to be equally effective at dredging mud and silt in docks, rivers and harbours.
….
Today, what is left of the firm trades in Bradford under new owner, Gardner Denver, the american based compresser and blower manufacturer. No longer are cranes or excavators manufactured. The replacment parts business became unsustainable after the last Priestman emplyee retired in 2007. All the drawings and specifications exist. These are all in storage slowley deteriating with age. The legacy lives on ?.

I gotta go back there and check if that crane is still there and get a decent photo of it. Here’s a very enthusiastic fan of Priestman vehicles. If that link doesn’t ping his post, I’ll leave a comment pointing him here!

PS. this is my first post from my newly installed Ubuntu 9.10 on a big 500GB internal drive. Previously I managed with about 40GB of space which wasn’t enough when shooting in RAW. Working off external USB drives was sort of painful but now I can store a few years worth of photos on my speedy internal drive!